CES 2016: Sony

amirm

Banned
Apr 2, 2010
15,813
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0
Seattle, WA
Yes... I am not done. Your suffering and mine will continue with more pictures and absurd commentary....



This is what happens when you hire some marketing company to create a booth for you, trying to make you look cool without knowing what you really doing. I mean who would have thought to spend boatloads of money to have washed out, poor quality video scrolling continuously making you think you are dizzy and the floor is moving instead?



Their suite of cameras and lenses getting next to zero attention. Instead of having a hands on area like Canon and Nikon have with experts behind the counter to answer questions, they put theirs on static display. Nice going guys.



As expected the main buzz was HDR and 4K combo TVs. HDR is high dynamic range and 4K is four times the resolution of your current TV.



Demo material was excellent showing very high contrast and beautiful images. Sashimi anyone?



And of course the "thin" marketing campaigns and competition continues as if there is anyone left to care:


And for those who care, surprise! The back panel has an appendage:



I said images were pretty, did I not?


My pictures don't do justice to them:



Can you say, "we copied Apple stores?" I knew you could:



Neat little gizmos struggling to bring value to IoT or Internet of Things. Little parts with bluetooth and various sensors and blinking LEDs allows simple devices to be built and programmed. Interesting for 10 minutes:



Most of the booth was "lifestyle" demos which no doubt were put together by the same Maddison Avenue design firms like this projector that was 10 foot wide, 3-4 foot deep and only came in white!



Idea being that you would look chick by projecting faded color images on the wall. There is actually cool technology there in the form of a wide angle lens with very short throw enabling such a big image at just a foot or so from the wall. But a big blob of white on the floor? You should have seen the look of disbelief from people asking, "does it come in other colors?" and the answer being, "no, just white."



And oh, if you wanted a blurry, pixelated image of a fake fireplace, Sony is right there with this "pico" projector:



In other news, they had a room with a demo of these loudspeakers which I understand Michael will replace his JBLs with:



I went in the room and they started to play this awful crappy sound. Right before I wanted to leave, the turned on a dozen of them and oh man, it actually sounded good with a ton of bass! The speakers chain together to provide more power outside. Was a nice demo of what a wall of speakers may sound like. Well done here. Forget about everything bad I wrote above. OK, let's not go crazy.

THen we get to this odd booth completely out of place to show their dedication to high-res music and mastering of old content:



Look carefully. Do you spot BruceB there? You should because that is his Reel to Reel deck he loaned to Sony. What did they do with it? They used it as a dead prop doing absolutely nothing in the back!

The scripted demo was actually playing the digitized analog masters created by Battery Studios in New York City. Did they bring a real mastering engineer there like our own Bruce Brown?



Nope. The person there is Andy Munitz which is a product trainer in Sony Broadcast division. He would play the tracks from an audio workstation as the announcer would prompt him.



Horrors of horrors. Every track they played was hot, hot, hot. VU meter would spend time between -5 db and clipping!


See the VU meters hitting red on the right side of the monitor? Un...believable.

After the last demo finished, a older gentleman angrily said, "you have to slide left channel by 0.2 milliseconds and bring its level down by 1.5 to 2 db!" He went on to say that it was all wrong they way they played it. Man I thought I had good ears. This guy knows the timing of music created by someone else is wrong by 0.2 milliseconds! This arguments went on forever with the guy not letting go of Andy's pant legs.

Gear used:


Music they played (which by the way just sounded OK as far as fidelity):


 

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